DevOps is a popular trend in IT and have been gathering steam. The challenges with DevOps for large companies are plentiful. One of the key roadblocks comes from the Vendor Management and Vendor Contracting groups. Nothing to do with the actual task at hand. Large companies often outsource development to one or more large System Integrators. They develop the code or assemble the solution and hand it off to another company doing the operations support. The contracts these companies write are usually very specific on who is responsible for what. If you want one Integrator to support your performance testing, that must be in the contract and part for the price or bid.

How do we get the two or more SI’s to work towards a DevOps model? The customer must adjust their contracting terms to accommodate this and provide a path.

Starting the DevOps culture in a Large fortune 500 company is no small task. You can define and start a pilot within your Performance testing team. A meaningful performance test requires multiple disciplines to execute and analyze results and for root cause analysis.

The Performance engineer drives the process, the application architect can see the application under load or stress to see how their design is working, the operations team can see the installation and configuration process, can help with the automation and deployment scripts or approach. All can benefit from the APM monitoring that is required for critical transactions. I think it might a smaller challenge to get some SI buying for this type of approach. Then perhaps more onto a Production application.